“Co-convened by Carter and Cervenak, The Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures after Property and Possession seeks to interrogate the relation between race, sexuality, and juridical and theological ideas of self-possession, often evidenced by the couplet of land-ownership and self-regulation, a couplet predicated on settler colonialism and historically racist, sexist, homophobic and classist ideas of bodies fit for (self-)governance. The title of the working group and speaker series points up the ways blackness figures as always outside the state, unsettled, unhomed, and unmoored from sovereignty in its doubled-form of aggressively white discourses on legitimate citizenship on one hand and the public/private divide itself on the other. The project will address questions of the “black outdoors” in relationship to literary, legal, theological, philosophical, and artistic works, especially poetry and visual arts.”

Parking information for this weekend’s Black Audio Film Collective Screening & Lecture Series is detailed below. Due to numerous activities planned for the weekend in Downtown Atlanta, guests are strongly encouraged to carpool or use MARTA (Atlanta’s mass transit system): http://www.itsmarta.com

The Florence Kopleff Recital Hall is located at 10 Peachtree Center Avenue in the Arts and Humanities building on the Georgia State University campus at the corner of Peachtree Center Avenue and Gilmer Street. The nearest MARTA station is Five Points. Parking for The Florence Kopleff Recital Hall is available in the G Deck located at Wall Street and Central Avenue. Parking is free in the G Deck on Saturday and Sunday using the Collins Street entrance. The G Deck closes at 10:00 p.m. on Friday and 9:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For directions: http://www.music.gsu.edu/locations.aspx and http://parking.gsu.edu/parking-locations/facultystaff/g-deck/

The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (ACAC) is located at 100 Means Street NW. Free parking is available in the lot opposite ACAC at the corner of Means Street, Bibb Street, and Bankhead Ave. Enter at the parking attendant booth. http://thecontemporary.org/about/visit

The National Center for Civil and Human Rights is located at 100 Ivan Allen Jr. Blvd. in downtown Atlanta between the Georgia Aquarium and the World of Coca-Cola at Pemberton Place®. The nearest MARTA stations are Peachtree Center or Dome/GWCC/Philips Arena/CNN Center. Parking is available at the World of Coca-Cola or Georgia Aquarium garages. For directions: http://www.civilandhumanrights.org/directions-and-parking Guests attending events at this location may consider parking on the Georgia State University campus in the G Deck located at Wall Street and Central Avenue. Parking is free in the G Deck on Saturday and Sunday using the Collins Street entrance. The Center is located only a 20 minute walk from the GSU campus. The G Deck closes at 10:00 p.m. on Fridayand 9:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday. For G Deck parking directions: http://parking.gsu.edu/parking-locations/facultystaff/g-deck/

liquid blackness is proud to announce the release of its third issue, which reflects on the liquid blackness Symposium held during the Spring of 2014. It features eight essays and an editorial reflection.

Planned in conjunction with the presentation of the Black Audio Film Collective film series hosted by liquid blackness at Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA on September 26-28 and October 3-4, this issue will address a range of topics prompted by, but not limited to, BAFC’s filmmaking practice in the context of Black Atlantic artistic and intellectual flows.

One of several collectives formed in response to the conservative politics and racial uprising of the Thatcher era, the Black Audio Film Collective (comprising John Akomfrah, director of the critically acclaimed The Stuart Hall Project, Reece Auguiste, Edward George, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson, David Lawson and Trevor Mathison) produced experimental films that critically engaged existing archives, visualized a variety of forms of counter-history and diasporic subjectivities, while “eschew[ing] the notion of the singular authentic, homogeneous black voice” (Eddie Chambers). Employing techniques of remixing, sampling, looping, and repetition and partly inspired by the US black radical tradition (Malcolm X, Black Power, the Black Panthers, and the Black Arts Movement), the collective’s work offers an opportunity to engage in conversations about political visibility, identity, aesthetics, in the cultural, social, and artistic milieu of the black diaspora.

This film series and publication comes one year after liquid blackness hosted the “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema” film series (see our February 2014 special issue: “liquid blackness on the LA Rebellion”) in order to continue an investigation of the relationship between artistic experimentation and black radicalism. We have chosen, once again, to privilege ideas of fluidity to emphasize the fashioning and mobilizing of diasporic identities that put pressure on the idea of “black” (as in “black” art, identity, culture, etc.), just like the output of the Black Audio Film Collective demanded that official 1980s and 1990s British culture reckon with its diasporic communities. Fluidity further provides a way to take inspiration from BAFC’s use of sound as descriptive of a versatile, mobile, and immersive “logic” of plunging available historical and artistic archives. Finally, fluidity emphasizes a productive permeability between theoretical innovations and artistic practices in pursuit of unfixabilities of both identity and representation.

We welcome submissions that engage in a variety of disciplinary traditions including Film/Media Studies, New Media, Visual Culture Studies, Art Criticism, and Critical Theory. Possible topics may include:

Collaborative filmmaking and art-making practices and collective modes of artistic and intellectual production

Hybrid exhibition practices, straddling the line between art, commercial, and public spaces

Critical investigation of official archives

Aesthetics of sampling, remixing, and “digitopias” (John Akomfrah)

Disjunctive and hauntological uses of sound

Reflections on modes of transience, migration, and diaspora identities

Theories and practices of the black radical tradition

Afrofuturist visions and sounds

Please send a (maximum 500 word) abstract, 5 bibliographical sources and a short bio to liquidblackness@gsu.edu no later than August 15, 2014. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by August 25 and complete essays (2,500-3,000 words) will be due on October 1st. For more information contact liquid blackness at the above address.